03 August 2015

Karl Marx makes use of the original distinction between Manufacture, meaning the organised
co-operation of many workers in a single workshop, and Industrial Production, which is the same, but with powered
machinery. In modern usage, this distinction is not always clear. Marx in his Chapter
14 (attached) says this:

“That co-operation which is based on division of
labour, assumes its typical form in manufacture, and is the prevalent
characteristic form of the capitalist process of production throughout the
manufacturing period properly so called. That period, roughly speaking, extends
from the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century.”

The rest of Section 1 of this chapter is a description of division of
labour under the early form of capitalism: Manufacture.

Then, in Section 2, Marx describes the effect on an individual or
“detail labourer”, and on production, as a consequence of division of labour.

In Section 3, Marx looks at the gain that is made when serial production
can be achieved, as opposed to batch or individual piece production.

“The different detail processes, which were successive
in time, have become simultaneous, go on side by side in space. Hence,
production of a greater quantum of finished commodities in a given time. [11]
This simultaneity, it is true, is due to the general co-operative form of the
process as a whole; but Manufacture not only finds the conditions for
co-operation ready to hand, it also, to some extent, creates them by the
sub-division of handicraft labour. On the other hand, it accomplishes this
social organisation of the labour-process only by riveting each labourer to a
single fractional detail.”

In Section 4, Marx compares division of labour in a factory, with
division of labour in society.

Section 5 is a readable essay on division of labour as treated by the
bourgeois Political Economists, including Adam Smith.

In short, this is another chapter of “Capital” that you can conquer
without difficulty.

Image: Walter Crane was a 19th-century artist who
illustrated many socialist pamphlets. This particular work was done for May
Day, the Workers’ Day, in 1895.